Reelbird

Reelbird is a free, open-source screen recorder for macOS 15 and later. It records your Mac screen, camera and microphone, and a share link is on your clipboard the moment you stop recording. Later you can add auto-zoom, a smooth cursor and captions, then update that same link. It is built for Apple silicon Macs, requires no account, and is MIT licensed. Its main purpose is to combine the fast, link-on-stop workflow of Loom with the polished auto-zoom look of Screen Studio in a single take, for free, with the files kept on your Mac. The problem it solves is a split in existing screen recording tools. Loom gets you a link fast, but on its free Starter plan it stops each video at 5 minutes, keeps 25 videos, records up to 720p and offers no downloads, and it has no auto-zoom. Screen Studio produces polished auto-zoom videos but costs $29 a month, or $9 billed yearly, and its share link only exists after you export. Reelbird does both from one take, for free: the link is ready when you stop, the polish can come later under the same link, and every take is kept as MP4 files on your Mac. Reelbird sets no limits of its own. Where the alternatives still do more: Loom has comments, view counts and apps for every platform, and Screen Studio has a more mature editor and a signed download. Recording starts with a simple choice. You pick a display, a window or an area, and the shortcut ⌥⇧R starts a recording from any app. The picker shows windows to choose from, including ones on other desktops, along with switches for microphone, camera, system audio and Share while recording. Camera, microphone and system audio record as separate tracks, so screen, camera, microphone and system audio stay apart. Keeping those tracks separate means you can move the camera bubble or mute system sound after recording instead of committing at capture time. The recording bar shows the timer, microphone level, pause, restart, delete and Stop. Share while recording is the core of the workflow. With it turned on, Reelbird uploads a 1080p stream to your own bucket as you record. When you stop, a Shared popover shows the link with Copy, Open in Browser and Update Link, and the link is already on your clipboard. You can paste it anywhere and it plays in any browser a moment later, with no app and no sign-in. The link never changes, even when you update the video: after editing, Update link replaces the video and the URL stays the same, so everyone you already sent it to sees the new version. Polishing happens under that same link, whenever you have time. Auto-zoom follows your clicks and typing, with a Subtle to Punchy slider in the Zoom inspector and zoom regions marked on the timeline; a real export zooms in on each click, then out again, planned from the clicks in the recording. The cursor is redrawn from the log so it glides smoothly instead of jittering, and you can resize or hide it after recording. Preview and export use the same Metal renderer, so the file looks exactly like what you watched. Framing options include background, padding, rounded corners, shadow, and a camera bubble you can move after the fact. Audio and captions are handled on the Mac. Auto level measures your voice and sets it to −16 LUFS, so a quiet take comes out at a normal level. Voice enhance uses Apple's sound isolation to take out room noise and hum where your Mac supports it, then applies a gentle compressor, de-esser and presence lift. Ducking dips system audio about 12 dB while you speak and brings it back when you stop. Captions are made on your Mac by Apple's speech recognition; you can burn them in or offer them as a track viewers can turn on. Cut Long Silences finds pauses and removes them in one go, and any cut can be restored. Safe peaks put a limiter on every track and on the mix with a −1.5 dBFS ceiling so nothing clips. Reliability and output formats are designed around not losing work. Every track is written to disk in 2-second segments from the first frame, so if your Mac crashes Reelbird recovers the take on next launch, minus at most two seconds. Warnings for a silent microphone, stalled capture, audio drift, a filling disk or uploads falling behind show up during the recording rather than after it. Exports come in the usual formats: MP4 (H.264), HEVC, ProRes and GIF with hardware encoding, in landscape, square, vertical or 4:3. Overall, the architecture is deliberately simple. Your Mac records and uploads; your bucket — Cloudflare R2, S3, B2 or MinIO — stores the files; any browser plays them. Setup takes about ten minutes, once: a bucket, a scoped API token and a public URL, entered through endpoint, bucket, region, access keys, public URL and prefix fields and verified with Test Connection. Reelbird is native and light: Swift, ScreenCaptureKit and Metal, with no Electron and no third-party dependencies. A take is an open project format — a .reelbird folder of standard MP4s, JSON and an event log — so nothing is locked in. Privacy follows the same principle: nothing leaves your Mac unless you share it. Recordings, edits, captions and transcripts stay in ~/Movies/Reelbird. Captions and titles come from Apple's on-device frameworks, with no API keys and no cloud. Shares go only to the bucket you set up, signed with your own keys, and the secret lives in your Keychain. There is no account, analytics, telemetry, crash reporting or update checks. Links are unlisted, not secret: anyone with a link can watch, so share accordingly, and Stop sharing deletes every file under that link. Reelbird can also be driven by an MCP helper: adding it to an assistant exposes list_sources, start_recording, stop_recording and share, so you can ask for a 20-second demo of a settings page you just changed and get the polished share link back. The benefits follow from that workflow. Because the link arrives the moment you stop, you can share immediately and improve the video later without resending anything. Because the polish happens under the same link, you avoid re-exporting and re-sharing. Because the files live on your Mac and your own bucket, you control storage and cost — Cloudflare R2's free tier of 10 GB with free egress covers most people. Typical scenarios include recording a quick demo of a feature you just shipped, turning a raw take of a task app or settings page into a walkthrough with zooms and captions, recording a voiceover with system audio and ducking or muting it afterwards, and capturing automated demos on request through the MCP integration. Installation, platform and pricing are straightforward. Reelbird is free and MIT licensed, with no paid tier, watermark or export limit. Download the zip from the download page, unzip it, and drag Reelbird to Applications; it is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens like any other app. You can also build it from source with git clone and make install using Apple's Command Line Tools, with no Xcode needed. It runs on macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon Macs, and version 0.1.1 shipped in October 2026. It does not work on Windows or Linux, and that is not planned, because Reelbird is built on Apple frameworks throughout. In short, Reelbird gives Mac users a free, open-source way to record the screen, camera and microphone, get a share link the moment they stop, and polish that same take later with auto-zoom, a smooth cursor, captions and audio cleanup under a link that never changes. With your own storage bucket, no account and no telemetry, it is a privacy-conscious alternative that combines Loom's speed with Screen Studio's polish.